The
idea that people can be born bad goes back at least as far as the Old
Testament, which accounts for the transmission of original sin by relating
the story of the fall of Adam and Eve.The Bible’s theological concept of original sin was translated
into scientific terms during the first days of the American republic,
when Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
proposed a biological explanation for the behavior of people who seemed
unable to obey the law.1

The
concept of inherent criminality has evolved through many stages since
Benjamin Rush’s day. This exhibit asks how proponents of the various
biological explanations of criminality presented their theories and
persuaded audiences of those theories’ validity.

Phrenology: ca.
1800-1870

The
first systematic efforts to identify biological causes of crime were
made as part of the broader science of phrenology, an approach to understanding
human behavior that is usually traced back to the work of Franz Joseph
Gall (d. 1828), an Austrian physician.According to Gall and other phrenologists, each of our mental
abilities is located in a separate part of the brain and functions independently,
in relative isolation from the others.One of the brain’s “faculties” or “organs” can be normal, while
another lies dormant or atrophies.

Phrenologists
differed over the number and names of the faculties but agreed that
crime results when faculties such as acquisitiveness and combativeness
become disordered.Because
they were unable to study the brain directly, phrenologists drew conclusions
about it from the contours of the skull. That is, they assumed that
the development of the brain’s various faculties or organs is reflected
in the skull’s bumps and hollows. (Thus critics derided phrenology as
“bumpology.”)

Phrenology
contributed powerfully to nineteenth-century thinking about criminality
as a mental illness.Championed
most strongly by physicians, phrenology encouraged articulation of the
so‑called medical model of criminality, which interprets criminal
behavior as a sickness and hence properly part of medicine’s jurisdiction.Phrenology supported the belief that criminals, because sick,
are not responsible for their behavior, a belief that became the basis
for the legal defense of insanity.Additionally, phrenology provided a biological (and sometimes
hereditarian) explanation for crime. The immensely popular phrenologist
Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, for example, argued that criminality can be
inherited—-and that through reproductive controls it can be prevented
in the next generation.

Benjamin
Rush, the American patriot and physician, foreshadowed phrenology in
a 1786 speech on “The Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty.”In this and later writings, Rush attributed “innate moral depravity”—
by which he meant uncontrollable criminality—to “defective organization
in those parts of the body, which are occupied by the moral faculties
of the mind.” 2Moral depravity,
Rush argued, is similar to a physical disease, and those who suffer
from it are “very properly...subjects of medicine.” 3But Rush did not argue that moral depravity is usually inherited.Rather, he believed that most criminalistic people induce their
own depravity through gluttony, habitual drunkenness, and other behaviors
that damage the moral faculties.

Phrenology
peaked about 1850, but it continued to attract adherents throughout
the nineteenth-century. Moreover, the phrenological view that people
can induce criminal behavior through excessive eating, drinking, and
sexual activity led directly to degeneration theory, the next stage
in the development of biological theories of crime.

Degeneration
Theory: ca. 1870-1910

The
late nineteenth-century physicians and social scientists who studied
human degeneration taught that individuals can devolve over the course
of a life span.Self-abuse
and excess lead to degeneration, a weakened physical condition that
in turn weakens one’s moral capacity and thus leads to crime and other
social problems.However,
by obeying the laws of good health and morality, even degenerates can
reverse their downward slide and begin to regenerate physically and
ethically.

Working
before the discovery of genes, degenerationists attributed heredity
to “the germ plasm,” a substance that they thought transmitted certain
traits through the generations.Weakened germ plasm, in the degenerationists’ view, is the fundamental
cause of most social problems.According to this way of thinking, a criminal grandfather and
sexually promiscuous grandmother—both obviously carriers of unhealthy
germ plasm—might produce an insane son and alcoholic daughter, whose
offspring, in turn, might bear children who are “feebleminded” (mentally
retarded), thievish, or “pauperized” (dependent on welfare).In the degenerationists’ view, the manifestations of degenerate
germ plasm are interchangeable.

The
findings of bad-family research alarmed policymakers, who concluded
that degeneration could wreak havoc in generations to come.The message was not entirely gloomy, however, because degenerationists
did not view inheritance as fixed and immutable.If degenerates could be persuaded (or forced) to lead more upright
lives, they might produce better “stock” and thus produce fewer social
problems in the next generation.

Criminal Anthropology:
ca. 1880-1910

Much
more pessimistic was the message of the next (and overlapping) group
of biological theorists, criminal anthropologists, who taught that some
criminals are unchangeable “born” criminals, doomed to lives of crime.According to criminal anthropologists, born criminals form a
distinct criminal type with twisted bodies, minds, and morals. Low-browed,
long-armed, and apelike in appearance, they are in fact throwbacks to
an earlier phase of evolution, primitives who are incapable of conforming
to the laws of civilized societies.

Combining
degenerationist themes with the new science of evolution, criminal anthropology
began attracting public attention in the 1880s in both Europe and the
United States.In Europe
its main proponent was the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, whose
treatise Criminal Man went through five editions, was widely
translated, and inspired many imitations.With his son-in-law William Ferrero, Lombroso also wrote The
Female Offender, the first book on women law-breakers.

Heightening
the impact of criminal anthropology was a new method of identifying
repeat offenders introduced by a Frenchman, August Bertillon.Bertillon’s method involved taking a series of measurements of
criminals’ feet, forearms, heads, and so on, and then filing this information
in such a way that it could be used to identify a criminal if he or
she were rearrested—even if the offender used an alias.The procedure was not based on criminal anthropology (or, for
that matter, on any other theory of crime).Bertillon’s interest, in this period before fingerprinting, lay
solely in detecting repeat offenders.However, his method, which was adopted in both the United States
and Europe, so closely resembled the measurement procedures of criminal
anthropologists that it helped persuade the public of the validity of
criminal anthropology.

Degeneration
theory and criminal anthropology converged to convince policymakers
and members of the general public of the need for eugenic policies that
would prevent socially undesirable people from reproducing.Eugenic concepts had been advocated for centuries, but they did
not become the basis for an organized social movement until after 1883,
when the Englishman Sir Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” to
refer to “the science of improving stock” through selective matings.5

Although
Lombroso did not draw eugenic conclusions from criminal anthropology,
many of his American followers did.By the end of the nineteenth-century, policymakers were calling
for sterilization or lifetime institutionalization of “born” criminals
to prevent their reproduction.But by this time it was clear that many criminals did not exhibit
the physical abnormalities predicted by criminal anthropology.The problem became one of finding a simple and sure method of
distinguishing “born” criminals from offenders who merely fell into
crime through circumstance.

Feeblemindedness
Theory: ca. 1905-1920 and
beyond

An
apparent solution to the problem of identifying “born” criminals arrived
about 1910, with the introduction of Binet’s method of intelligence
testing.Even before this,
however, American eugenicists had begun advancing a new biological theory
according to which the worst or born criminals are feebleminded (mentally
retarded) and “the feebleminded” (persons with mental retardation) are
by nature criminalistic.

Feeblemindedness
theory was prompted by developments in genetics.In 1900, scientists rediscovered the laws of inheritance that
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, had formulated through experimentation
with garden peas.And early
in the twentieth-century, scientists also began to reject the idea that
acquired characteristics can be inherited, replacing it with the new
view that chromosomal germ cells (what today we call genes) determine
heredity.Applying Mendel’s
rules to human inheritance, and assuming that feeblemindedness was a
single, inherited trait, eugenicists reasoned that if they could prevent
feebleminded people from having children, they would be able to rid
the country of feeblemindedness and crime in a few generations.

One
of the foremost American proponents of this new theory was the eugenicist
Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist at the New Jersey Training School for
Feebleminded Boys and Girls.In
1908, during a European tour, Goddard learned of a method of measuring
intelligence with pencil-and-paper tests that was being pioneered by
the French psychologist Alfred Binet.Quickly translating Binet’s tests and applying them, without
standardization, in institutions for juvenile delinquents, Goddard found
that most law‑breakers tested at or below the “mental age” of
twelve, which he immediately identified as the upper limit of feeblemindedness.

Goddard’s
apparently definitive evidence that what ails criminals is weak intelligence
was confirmed by other psychologists who administered intelligence tests
in prisons and reformatories.At the same time, officials at institutions for the feebleminded
proclaimed that nearly all of their charges were inclined to criminal
behavior.The feeblemindedness theory of crime seemed to have been scientifically
verified.

One
result of this theory was a rapid expansion of the system of training
schools for the feebleminded and their transformation into custodial
institutions where people with mental retardation could be held for
life.Another result was
the enactment in several states of “defective delinquent” laws that
enabled authorities to hold accused and convicted offenders who seemed
feebleminded for up‑to‑life terms, again for eugenic purposes.6

Advances
in genetics and mental testing began undermining the feeblemindedness
theory of crime about 1915.Nevertheless,
eugenicists continued endorsing it for many years.For instance, in 1934 the criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor
Glueck reported that most inmates of the Massachusetts reformatory for
women were mentally defective.They recommended that such women be held for life, irrespective
of their crimes.

Multiple
and Diverse Biological Theories:ca. 1930-2000

Since
the heyday of feeblemindedness theory, scientists have proposed a range
of biological explanations of crime, some incorporating themes of the
past, others striking out in new directions.

About
1915, some psychiatrists began translating the psychological concept
of feeblemindedness into their own theory of psychopathy.They portrayed the psychopath as “constitutionally inferior”
but not necessarily feebleminded.Moreover, although many of these theorists sympathized with eugenics,
few claimed that psychopathy per se is inherited.

More
in tune with earlier traditions was The American Criminal (1939),
an anthropological study by Harvard professor Ernest A. Hooton that
called for eugenic control of offenders.A companion volume, Crime and the Man (1939), examined
the anthropological characteristics of criminals by race and ethnicity,
closing with a cartoon (sketched by Hooton himself) of a policeman hauling
a criminal off to a prison labeled “Birth Control Clinic.”

Inspired
by Hooton, in the 1940s Harvard psychologist William H. Sheldon launched
the field of “constitutional psychology,” an attempt to correlate criminal
tendencies with body types.Like
Hooton, Sheldon was a eugenicist.His self-described aim was to make “a direct attack on our most
deadly enemy—- careless reproduction.”

Nazi
efforts to eliminate “degenerates” made eugenics disreputable.However, research continues on biological factors in crime, and
when it purports to identify factors that are genetic, it has distinctly
eugenic implications.In
The Bell Curve (1994), for instance, Richard Herrnstein and Charles
Murray argue that “IQ is substantially heritable” and that low IQ scores
are strongly associated with criminality.

Some
late twentieth-century theorists have speculated about links between
criminal behavior and brain anomalies, while others have attributed
criminality to abnormalities of the endocrine system.Hormones are indicted by PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome) theorists,
who posit a correlation between menstruation and violence in women.For a while, XYY theorists claimed to have established an association
between men with an extra Y chromosome and violent behavior. Recently,
crime has been tied to deficits in levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin
and to unusually small amounts of gray matter in the brain.Returning to Richard Dugdale’s genealogical method, some scientists
are again studying families for histories of violence and other psychopathologies.

As
in the past, late twentieth-century biological theories of crime have
tended to picture criminality as a sort of disease or physical abnormality.Today’s theories are less deterministic than their predecessors,
however; they speak of probabilities and of people who are “genetically
at risk” rather than claiming that all people with a certain trait will
become offenders.And they
are more likely than earlier theories to recognize the effects of interactions
between people and their environments.

Biological
theories offer just one type of explanation of crime; many other theories
explain criminal behavior in social terms.In this exhibit, we focus solely on biological theories, concentrating
on their visual strategies.This
history of the sciences of criminal bodies is designed to encourage
viewers to decode and analyze the rhetorical imagery of those sciences
and to ponder assumptions about the boundaries between science and art.

1.At about the same time, the first French psychiatrists embarked
on similar work.

2.This particular quotation is from a second essay by Rush, “Of
Derangement in the Moral Faculties,” in Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries
and Observations, upon the Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia: Kimber
and Richardson, 1812): 360.